The Gallbladder

 

 

It's a routine procedure,

he'll be done in no time.

Two blood transfusions later

and we're circling his hospital bed like vultures

wiping the sweat away from his edemas frown.

I want to take his place; erase the presence of bleeding out

his tracheostomy tube whistles comically along with the chime of his heart.

he'll be gone in no time,

no time.

Flowers and phone calls pollute the ICU front desk

continuing to keep strangers on shift.

we turn up the television so he can hear golf.

now sit back and watch the monitors

see the numbers peak and disappear on screen

for hours we wait,

until his choking tube begins to fill with impenetrable spit

brows bulging purple and furrowing deep into a cough that could be eternal

it cannot escape a throat caught tight

a plastic straw

keeps him alive.

As they pushed us out and closed the blinds they said,

he'll be just fine

I watched him foam at the mouth through a crack in the door

with a rabid need

to survive.

 

 

 

Reviews

[The Thracian]

You know what I like about this? The first two lines could be about death as much as anything else.


It's routine,


he'll be done in no time.

Suggestion:
his tracheostomy tube whistles comically along [to] the [rhythm] of his heart.

I was thinking even changing it up entirely, since it seems a little clich� to be honest..

his tracheostomy tube rasps sardonically below his wry smile..

Which brings up a point I did not like about this. I felt like you focused on technical terms a lot, almost as if you were proud that you knew, because at the time you had to know, because then it was the world to you.. but that, when you wrote this, it was more.. confined? It's as if the emotion of this poem is refined in a really bad way because these words that you would otherwise not use, or befriend, are the only emphatic traces of pathos. Ya know? it's all desultory... Disjoint enjambments of meaning...

Other suggestion:

we turn up the television so he can hear golf,
and sit back to watch the monitors,
to see the numbers peak, disappear off the screen.
For hours, and hours - we wait

Doesn't it feel kind of rude when a total stranger just messes around with your poetry? Awesome, trust me, I would know.

The title read as 'glabella' to me at first, and that's honestly the only reason I came here.

[Butterflymom]

This is intense, discriptive, and very well done. WOW, what a surprise.